misbegotten Review of The Butchering

The Butchering (2015)

Have you heard the (Urban) Legend of Tommy Miller?

[6/10 · 13 February 2019]

Whereas the various entries in the post-SCREAM slasher revival were made by filmmakers who spent their formative years enjoying the slasher boom that followed in the wake of the original HALLOWEEN, time marches on, and we're now seeing slasher movies made by people who grew up watching those post-SCREAM movies. Case in point: low budget effort BRAXTON (2015), which was re-titled THE BUTCHERING in the US, initially released straight to DVD in the UK as BRAXTON BUTCHER, and was re-released there under it's original title at the beginning of 2019. Shot in Northern Ireland with a local cast, when it's writer/editor/producer/director Leo McGuigan was only nineteen years old, BRAXTON cheerfully references NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994) and the SCREAM franchise in it's dialogue, while the storyline borrows heavily from the MY BLOODY VALENTINE remake (2009), and visually it pays homage to URBAN LEGEND (1998) with a fur-lined hooded parka-clad killer and the faithful recreation of a key moment. It's not perfect - at an hour & fifty minutes in length, it's too long, and accordingly the narrative drags in places. Some occasional lines of dialogue also feel out-of-place, too clearly the product of a screenwriter sitting at this desk instead of something a real person would actually say. And the final revelational scene when the killer reveals all, contains one unnecessary twist too many. But BRAXTON had more pluses than minuses: the young cast look like ordinary, ache-ridden teenagers instead of the impossibly good-looking hunks and Victoria's Secret models that populate American slashers . And it's genuinely difficult to predict who's going to survive - the character who I initially thought was the Final Girl wasn't, and an individual who clearly had 'Victim' written all over her proved otherwise. Special mention to Laura Pyper lookalike Vicky Allen, who steals every scene she's in as the school's resident self-obsessed, two-timing Queen Bee. Remarkably, according to the IMDB it's her only on-screen role so far.